He had gone to meet the region's contemplative traditions — Hinduism, Buddhism — and the Indian sun had darkened his skin a few shades.

The trip changed him in less obvious ways, too.

Although you couldn't predict it then, his travels would end up changing the business world.

Back in the Bay Area, Jobs continued to cultivate his meditation practice. He was in the right place at the right time; 1970s San Francisco was where Zen Buddhism first began to flourish on American soil. He met Shunryu Suzuki, author of the groundbreaking "Zen Mind, Beginners Mind," and sought the teaching of one of Suzuki's students, Kobun Otogawa.

Zen Buddhism, and the practice of meditation it encouraged, were shaping Jobs' understanding of his own mental processes.

"If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is," Jobs told Isaacson. "If you try to calm it, it only makes things worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there's room to hear more subtle things — that's when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It's a discipline; you have to practice it."

Jobs felt such resonance with Zen that he considered moving to Japan to deepen his practice. But Otogawa told him he had work to do in California.

Evidently, Otogawa was a pretty insightful guy.

When you look back at Jobs' career, it's easy to spot the influence of Zen. For 1300 years, Zen has instilled in its practitioners a commitment to courage, resoluteness, and austerity— as well as rigorous simplicity.

It's the industrial design equivalent of the enso, or hand-drawn circle, the most fundamental form of Zen visual art.

An enso by Sengai Gibon, a Japanese Zen monk and artist active in at the turn of the 19th century. Wikimedia

But Zen didn't just inform the aesthetic that Jobs had an intense commitment to, it shaped the way he understood his customers. He famously said that his task wasn't to give people what they said they wanted; it was to give them what they didn't know they needed.

"Instead of relying on market research, [Jobs] honed his version of empathy — an intimate intuition about the desires of his customers," Isaacson said.